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 [Already controversial cellphone game Coolest Girl In School takes a refreshingly direct look at girls' experience of high school - and in this article reprinted from sister weblog GameSetWatch, Drew Taylor chats to creative director Holly Owen about the game's genesis and aims.]
The email from Holly Owen — Creative Director of cross-platform entertainment company Champagne for the Ladies — pops up on my computer screen, quite unexpectedly.
It's only been a few seconds since I sent her a message proposing a deadline for her interview answers, and up until this point there's generally been a day or two between replies. As a result, I'm a single click away from logging out of my webmail client and switching off the computer.
Instead, I open up her email, where I'm greeted by her shortest message to me yet. It contains just four words.
'Easy peasy pimply squeezy.'
A giant grin leaps onto my face, and in an instant I know that interviewing Holly about Coolest Girl in School—the Australian-made mobile phone game that's been controversially labeled 'GTA for girls'—is not just going to be an insightful exploration of developing a game for young women, but filled from start to finish with such quintessential phrases as, 'knickers in a knot' and 'truth dare double dare kiss'.
This is Holly's world I've entered into. A world where female gamers are referenced without the slightest hint of condescension, or the need to push the 'anything boys can do' tough-girl rhetoric; a world where terms such as 'pwnage' and 'teabag' simply don't exist.
 It's a world of high school, period pain, experimentation, fashionistas, average sex and perfect hair. And it all begins with an SMS...
Released in Australia in late 2007 (with a US, Canada and UK release expected early this year), Coolest Girl in School has more in common with trashy magazine quizzes, online social networks and personal diary entries than it does with the usual mobile phone game fare. Crazy, magazine cut-out visuals, overlaid on lined notebook paper, lead the player into a non-linear series of confronting and hilarious multiple-choice scenarios, while hand-drawn icons and over-the-top narrative give constant feedback on how cool (or not) the player is.
The gameplay itself focuses on ten days of high school, just prior to the school prom. The prom queen, however, has been found dead (her only remains being a pile of ash, a tiara and a bra) and the player now has the opportunity to lie, bitch, gossip, suck up and flirt their way to making as many friends as possible so that they can be nominated for the prom queen title.
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